Hiram in the Middle West

Hiram in the Middle West by Burbank L. Todd

Hiram in the Middle West follows Hiram Strong, a young farmer from the East, who arrives by night at Pringleton in February to manage Sunnyside Farm for Mr. Stephen Bronson. No one meets him at the station. The stationmaster, Jason Oakley, sends him toward Miss Delia Pringle's house and warns him off Yancey Battick, who is said to greet visitors with a rock-salt shotgun and to fear rats. Caught in a downpour, Hiram takes shelter at Battick's cottage anyway. Battick lets him in, shoots a rat by the fire, and gives him supper and his own bed. Hiram notices a coffin-shaped box of seed wheat in the room, and he sees that the grain is plump and carries a tiny red stripe. He concludes that Battick has bred a new wheat and fears thieves and rats. Hiram pockets a few kernels. The next morning Hiram walks on to Sunnyside, where the farmhouse has burned down. Miss Pringle, an excitable and kindly spinster who is eager for male company, scolds him for causing a night of worry. Hiram settles in a shed once used for incubators. Mr. Bronson arrives with his daughter Lettie, and Hiram lays out his plans. They include young cattle to eat the roughage and make manure, a silo, and a dairy future for the farm. He also wants to drain a poor twenty-acre wheat field cheaply. Letters from home tell him that Sister, the girl Mother Atterson adopted, has a legacy coming from a Cheltenham grandmother. She also has a brother who ran away from a reform school and must be found first. Hiram finds a feverish stranger in a calf shed, who gives his name as Orrin Post, and nurses him through the night. He fears smallpox, but Miss Pringle declares it measles and takes over the nursing. A pipe and a flask of peach brandy found in the shed lead Hiram to Adam Banks, a lazy, hostile local who has been sneering at the young manager and who is turned away when he asks for work. Orrin recovers and stays on as a farmhand. He is helpful and well-spoken but will say nothing about his past. Hiram buys ten-cent fire-killed pine trees from Miss Pringle and uses them as log drains in the wheat field, despite neighbors who call it foolish. At a dance on the new house floor, Hiram throws Banks out for dirtying the floor. Banks's friends then loose a savage bull on the party, and Orrin and Hiram smother it with a cape. After a tornado, the drains work well, but a stack of Battick's wheat burns. Battick suspects Banks, who was seen hurrying down the road, while Hiram suggests mice. Hiram then arranges a partnership in which Mr. Bronson will back the new wheat. The crops come in, the silo is filled, and the winter's work is mostly done. Late in the year a bearded farmer named Post and a lawyer, Eben Craddock, ask Hiram about a runaway named Theodore Chester, who is twenty-three and was last traced toward Pringleton on the very day Orrin appeared. Hiram says nothing to Orrin. He suspects that his helper is that young man and took the farmer's name while delirious. Hiram goes to Lettie's party in an ill-fitting mail-order dress suit and feels out of place. Lettie had also invited Orrin, but the invitation, addressed only to Pringleton, evidently went to the real Orrin Post. Over the winter Hiram, Orrin, and the boy Jim Larry enjoy the neighborhood's country gatherings.

By Burbank L. Todd · First published 1920 · Genre: Juvenile fiction, Agricultural fiction, Boys' adventure fiction · 32 chapters · 72,548 words

First lines

For an hour before the accommodation train stopped at Pringleton the rain had etched zigzag lines upon the windowpane beside Hiram Strong's seat; so to find the platform aglitter with puddles in the dull lamp light and the water dripping drearily from the station eaves did not surprise him. What was rather astonishing was to find Pringleton such a very lonely place.

As far as he could see, when he had walked around the bungalow-built station the light in the stationmaster's ticket office was the only light visible save the switch-targets and the disappearing green lamps on the end of the train. Hiram, with his heavy bag, was the only passenger who had got off the evening train.

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agrarian fiction · young farmer protagonist · farm management · Middle West · Corn Belt farming · rural Ohio River town · seed wheat breeding · agricultural experiment · eccentric recluse · rats and vermin · shotgun standoff · spinster neighbor

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Hiram in the Middle West is listed on Textopian as a novel by Burbank L. Todd, dated 1920 CE.

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